Broomstick firmly in hand, Hunter stood on the pitch with arms stretched wide, enjoying the gentle breeze and sunshine. He had spent most of the first half of the term wandering around the inside of RMI, trying to learn his way around and finding all the nooks and crannies he could discover. He had spent quite a lot of time in the secret passageways and had become pretty familiar with a lot of them… though he suspected he’d only really discovered a fraction of the extensive network so far. Learning his way around had been slow going at first, and had only gotten worse when he tried to draw himself a map. Once he gave up on both the map and the idea that corridors, secret or otherwise, made any sort of sense at all, he started finding his way around a lot faster. He didn’t know how or why, and he still wound up in unexpected and often exciting new places pretty often, but that was the way he liked it.

He hadn’t been spending enough time outdoors, though, and resolved to do more of that. Letting his arms fall gently back to his sides, he took a deep breath and swung one leg over the broom he had checked out from the shed and kicked off from the ground. He’d only been on a broom a few times now, and wasn’t very good at it yet. But he wanted to be.

He spent the first few minutes just… trying to stay still. The broom had a tendency to drift in one direction or another and he kept trying to center his weight so it wouldn’t go anywhere. This just made things worse and he’d wind up scooting sideways in awkward bursts that threatened to dislodge him. On one such burst he threw out an arm to restore his balance and avoid rolling over entirely… and it worked. Not only did he manage to avoid rolling but the drifting had stopped! Hunter had ridden a mechanical bull once or twice before and it felt kind of like that… though obviously with much less bucking about. Not only did sticking one arm out work remarkably well, he bet it looked pretty awesome, too.

Once he was satisfied he wasn’t drifting anymore, he decided it was time to try actually flying instead of just hovering. He thought he knew in principle how it worked and it seemed pretty intuitive, he figured he really just needed to develop the feel for it. He leaned forward gently and started to fly forward just a little… then got bored and leaned all the way forward and was off like a bolt.

Pumping a fist with a mad whoop as the wind flew through his fiery hair, Hunter abruptly pulled to the side as he passed next to the poles on one end of the pitch, trying out a skidding stop like on a bike. It worked, sort of, taking a bit more distance to stop than he had expected. Luckily the air was wide open and he didn’t have anything to hit.

He spent some time then playing around with turning and what sort of turn radii he got at different speeds. He learned that acceleration was good but braking and turning were pretty slow. Still, if he got good at it he figured he could be making precision slide moves with ease.

Then it was time to try a climb. He tried climbing straight up and worked on figuring out how steep an angle he could get. He tried spiraling up, and tried to figure out if he could climb any faster that way. He didn’t think so, it seemed to just need less space (though not much), but it was hard to tell.

Then it was time to give diving a shot. For the first time since getting on the broom, Hunter felt a sense of caution. There might not be much to run into out here… but there was still the ground, of course. He eased into a shallow dive, shedding altitude slowly. Again he experimented with both direct down angles and with spirals, seeing what he could do with each. Unsurprisingly, going down was faster than going up. A lot. A lot more fun too, though. Soon Hunter was back to whooping and fist pumping as he got increasingly daring with his dives.

Finally, he decided to see just how fast a dive he could pull off. He was at about the height he had started off at when he dipped the tip of his broom as far down as he could. He let out his loudest whoop yet as the ground rushed up at him… fast. At what he judged to be precisely the right moment he pull up sharply with the intention of skimming right over the grass.

It was not the right moment.

Just a moment too late Hunter realized that pulling out of a dive would naturally have a wider turning radius than a lateral turn because, you know… down. Although he was pulling out of the dive beautifully, it wasn’t quite fast enough and he had just a second or two to realize it. He wasn’t going to hit the ground too hard but he was definitely going to. He stuck his legs out in preparation for the rough landing he knew was coming.

He wasn’t disappointed. His feet hit the ground with a jolt and he was unseated from the broom and sent tumbling head over heels. The tumbling turned into rolling, then a skid, and then finally he came to a stop lying prone about ten feet away from where he first hit the ground, the broom a few feet further.

Lying there for a moment, he took stock and caught his breath. He was pretty sure nothing was broken, though he was equally certain he’d have at least a few spectacular bruises.

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